Robb Walsh

February 7, 2004

Guilty!!!

I have "reverse snob" written all over me.

I think the backlash started for me around 1995. I was interviewing Eddie Wilson, the guy who runs Threadgill's in Austin. He is also the guy who started Armadillo World Headquarters, hence the ultimate hippy. Threadgill's had started packaging frozen vegetables. I went to see the process. I was shocked to discover he was using frozen spinach instead of fresh in the spinach casserole. Texas has always been a big spinach producing state, so it wasn't a case of supply problems. Eddie confessed that the frozen just tasted better to him. And it didn't require washing.

I made creamed spinach at home with fresh and frozen after that, and I had to agree with him. I like fresh spinach. But frozen spinach works great in creamed spinach recipes.

Then we started talking beans. Canned black-eyed peas are better than what you get when you cook dried black-eyed peas from scratch, Eddie contended. Again, hard to argue. When fresh aren't in season, you are better off with canned. And that got me into pintos and black beans. I hate undercooked beans. And I ate a lot of undercooked black turtle beans during the Southerwestern cuisine era. Chefs trying not to cook them to death, I guess.

So I started experimenting with canned beans. And I decided that while canned refried beans smell like dog food, you can make damn good refrieds starting with canned whole pinto beans. In fact, since the average home cook gets impatient and uses beans that aren't cooked enough, a cookbook author might be better off to specify canned black beans in a recipe for refried black beans to begin with.

Which lead me to Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas with Velveeta and Philly Cheese Steaks with Cheez Whiz. The processed cheese is required in the definitive version of both, if you ask me.

This lead to a discussion of cream of mushroom soup. Go ahead and laugh!

A chef friend advances this theory: Cream of mushroom soup is actually the canned bechamel of American home cuisine. It is a master sauce in the sense Escoffier intended.

February 6, 2004

Thanks for your kind words Ellen.

And I am truly sorry to hear you have wandered from the true faith and now worship at the altar of Sally's Pizza. How can you go to Wooster Street and eat at the wrong pizzeria???

You must not like clams on your pizza.

It is, as my book establishes, an objective and immutable truth that Frank Pepe's in New Haven makes the best pizza on this planet. Anyone who doesn't weep on first eating the clam pie has no soul. I suspect your pizza opinions were formed during your misguided vegetarian youth.

As for your travel, I have always wanted to go to the Himalayas, Siberia and the spots your frequent. I hope to call you someday for tips on where to eat in Katmandu.

February 6, 2004

Don't worry, I didn't take your comments about thrill seeking personally Russ. I was responding on behalf of worm eaters everywhere.

But I am intriqued by your superman, "the sophisticated palate." As I mentioned earlier, I was taken to task in the NYT review of Are You Really Going to Eat That? because real "foodies" wouldn't bother with Popeye's Fried Chicken. Is the "sophisticated palate" an uberfoodie of some sort? Does the "sophisticated palate" eat cheese enchiladas made from Velveeta? White bread with barbecue?

February 6, 2004

Thanks John!

I'm very flattered. Not very good vivisectioning on your part, thank goodness.

I am indeed a great admirer of John Thorne. We argue about food via e-mail sometimes. And the subject of rich people's food versus poor people's food comes up quite a bit. I dare say eating well without money has been a central theme of his. But as much as I love Thorne's work, I have never been tempted to take the vow of poverty his POV demands.

But I think the subject of wealth, or lack thereof, is of particular interest to a discussion of the new era of food writing.

If the old elitist thesis was that everybody who read food journals had enough money for foie gras and old Sauternes, and the revolutionary antithesis was John Thorne's book, Outlaw Cook, which introduced a new kind of food writing which was all about eating with integrity and without money, then perhaps the culinarily adventuresome synthesis has begun to emerge, a variety of food writing that is neither elitist nor stridently prole.

Here in the Lone Star state, I am best known for writing about barbecue and Tex-Mex, both decidedly low-brow styles of cooking. But I have also been nominated for a Beard Award for coverage of the Texas wine industry. And I'm a wine competition judge as well. There are food writers of my acquaintance who see this as a conflict. "How can you take a barbecue writer's opinions about wine seriously?" some ask. While others see me as selling out the common man in pursuit of such elitist pastimes. The guys who write about barbecue generally don't write about haute cuisine.

Why?

I think it's a class issue. You know how incredibly earnest we Americans get about the egalatarian thing. What's the climate in the UK? Is there upper class and lower class food journalism there?

February 6, 2004

Good morning!

What a great day to play with your feces!

Let's dive into the smelliest part of Russ's comments first. Dr. Paul Rozin's discussion of why some cultures embrace a certain smelly mushy food and reject others had two main points. One, that eating smelly mushy foods is a form of thrill seeking and that the thrill seems to derive from breaking toilet training taboos. And two, once embraced, certain smelly mushy foods became emblematic of a culture. Fermented whale blubber to Eskimos, durian to Southeast Asians, blue cheese to Westerners.

But let's put this in the context of the rest of Rozin's work. Paul Rozin's main focus is trying to understand why people eat things that taste bad or smell bad on first encounter. He has actually written a lot more about chile peppers, coffee, and other irritating or bitter substances than he has about smelly mushy stuff, so it's not quite fair to depict him as caught up with toilet training.

The main thrust of Rozin's theory is that consuming chile peppers, coffee and smelly mushy things that don't initially recommend themselves as edible is a form of culinary thrill seeking. This activity, Rozin says, is akin to going to scary movies or riding on roller coasters. We get a thrill because there is a perceived danger or at least the activity is counterintuitive.

This is, of course, the logic behind the title of my book: Are You Really Going to Eat That: Reflections of a Culinary Thrill Seeker. And as I noted in the introduction, the thrill seeking part of my career started with chile peppers. One of the first pieces I ever published in a major newspaper was an humorous account that described the similarity of eating a raw jalapeño and having an acid flashback. The article ran in the LA Times food section back in 1990 or so. Was it edited by Russ Parsons? I think so.

But Russ brings up an interesting point. When we eat foods that are important to somebody's elses' culture for the sake of thrills, are we being ignorant rubes? And who are we to judge other cultures anyway. (There is a lot more on this subject in the Ultimate Pizza essay near the end of the book.) Am I a food writer who is stuck in the worm-eating stage of a troubled adolescence? Maybe so.

But of course I see it from a slightly different perspective. When I started writing about food, there weren't many media outlets that were interested in stories about smuggling chile peppers and eating durian. Restaurant reviewing and food writing at that time was all about "gourmets." We read about what our "betters" were eating and drinking the same way we read about fashion--in hopes that we might someday be rich enough to emulate that upper class.

When Are You Really Going to Eat That? was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, the reviewer sniffed, "Why would a foodie bother with Popeyes?" (I went to Popeye's as well as two homegrown Creole fried chicken joints in the essay called Third Ward Fried.)

And the answer is, if foodies are snobs who can't eat Popeye's fried chicken, please don't call me a foodie. Ironically, Julia Reed, the NYT's token Southerner mentioned serving Popeye's fried chicken at a Super Bowl party in her food column in the NYT magazine a couple of weeks later.

I write for the Houston Press, an alternative weekly. My previous job was editor of Chile Pepper magazine. Obviously, I am not a mainstream writer. But the kind of writing I do isn't as far out of the mainstream as it used to be. There are still plenty of elitist food writers out there. But there is a new adventurousness in food writing today and a new multiculturalism, especially in big cities with varied ethnic populations. Likewise, a new kind of food lover has emerged in America. If foodies are snobs who only eat "the right things," then this new kind of food lover is driven by different motives. I am talking about folks who get a kick out of trekking to an ethnic neighborhood to eat things they have never seen before. That's the kind of food lover (and food writer) I am. And I submit that there is a certain amount of thrill seeking involved.

If you are offending people in the neighborhood by making light of their food customs, you are indeed a rube. But if you have an open mind, and you learn something about what other people eat, then you are on the right track. Sure, everybody gets a big laugh when you bite into your first square of stinky tofu, or durian custard. But this is part of the culture too.

So I don't see any reason to apologize for being a culinary thrill seeker.

More worms, anyone?

December 2, 2003

Quail in Rose Petal Sauce

Serves 2 as Main Dish.

Thanks to Robb Walsh for contributing this excerpt with recipe from his new book, Are You Really Going To Eat That?

"A Rose by Any Other Name Would Taste as Sweet"

Ever so gently, the young woman gasped as I set the platter down on the table. It was a few days before Valentine's Day, and for dinner I had made quail in rose petal sauce. Laura Esquivel's novel Like Water for Chocolate made the dish famous. Tita, the Mexican cook whose dishes literally express her emotions, makes the sauce from roses given to her by Pedro, her forbidden lover. Putting this recipe together, I felt a little like I was preparing a witch's potion. And the most magical of the ingredients were the red roses.

Flowers aren't really unusual in cooking. In fact they are often essential. Bouillabaisse wouldn't be bouillabaisse without the intoxicating aroma of saffron threads, which are the orange-yellow stigmas of the purple crocus. Hot-and-sour soup wouldn't taste right without dried day lilies, known in China as "golden needles." And in New Orleans, no self-respecting bartender would dare serve a Ramos gin fizz without a splash of orange-flower water. But in none of these flower-flavored dishes can you actually recognize any blossoms. As the book title Please Don't Eat the Daisies suggests, actually putting whole blossoms in your mouth seems a little strange.

Roses in particular, with all their romantic connotations, look odd on an ingredient list. After all, when a man sends a woman a dozen roses, he doesn't expect that she's going to be making salad out of them. But in fact, roses have been eaten since ancient times. At some flower-strewn Roman feasts, rose petals were sprinkled on the food, the table, and all over the banquet hall. Rose petals, fresh, dried and crystallized, as well as rose water and rose syrup, are still widely used in the cuisines of the Middle East. Greek baklava, for instance, is authentically served with a drizzle of rose syrup.

Though roses are one of the most common flowers in our florist shops, we Americans hardly ever eat them. Which is a good thing, because modern systemic pesticides have made them highly toxic. And according to Cathy Wilkinson Barash, author of Edible Flowers: From Garden to Palate, even if you could eat modem hybrid roses, you'd probably be disappointed. "Queen Elizabeth has very little flavor," she reports. "Tropicana has none at all." Barash grows flowers organically so that she can use them in cooking. And she has eaten dozens of roses in her quest for good-tasting varieties. "My favorite eating rose is the beach rose (Rosa rugosa), which grows wild along much of the Atlantic coast," she says. "It has great aroma, and it tastes as good as it smells."

If you're looking for a cooking rose to grow organically in your garden, Barash recommends the David Austin varieties, which are throwbacks to old garden roses. "Gertrude Jekyll is my pick of his cultivars," she says. Among the modern hybrids, Mr. Lincoln, a deep velvety-red rose, and Tiffany, a light pink hybrid, are tastiest. Carrot slaw on a bed of pink Tiffany petals is one of Barash's favorite salads.

Flowers are also popular these days with innovative and romantic young chefs like Danielle Custer, the executive chef of Laurels Restaurant in Dallas. "I use a rose petal-infused oil for salads," she says. "I also serve my lobster bisque with rose petals sprinkled on top." We can thank the organic farming movement for the return of edible flowers to our cuisine. The pesticide-free cooking roses used by most American chefs come from organic gardeners in California who air-freight them to specialty food suppliers around the country. Chefs pay around $17 for fifty fresh thumbnail-sized blossoms.

So what does a good eating rose taste like? "I don't think roses really taste like much of anything on the palate," says Custer, "but there is an aroma and a texture and an association with their eye appeal that makes them very sensual, almost-- what's the word? -- aphrodisical."

In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita's quail in rose petal sauce certainly had that effect. After eating it, her sister Gertrudis "began to feel an intense heat pulsing through her limbs." Dripping with rose-scented sweat, Gertrudis went to the wooden shower stall in the backyard to wash. "Her body was giving off so much heat that the wooden walls began to split and burst into flame." Having set the shower stall on fire, Gertudis stood in her backyard, burning hot and smelling of roses, until she was suddenly swooped up by one of Pancho Villa's men, who charged into the backyard on horseback. "Without slowing his gallop, so as not to waste a moment, he leaned over, put his arm around her waist, and lifted her onto the horse in front of him, face to face, and carried her away." The naked Genrudis and the crazed soldier made love at a full gallop. The moral: Cook and eat flowers at your own risk.

I followed Tita's recipe pretty closely, except I added more roses. Not only did I use rose petals and rosewater as called for in the recipe, I also garnished the dish with an extra dozen tiny red buds. The young lady who ate the quail with me did not set my house on fire. (I kept a pitcher of water nearby just in case.) But the striking beauty and the deep perfume of all those roses certainly made her cheeks flush.

Adapted from Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies)

My local Middle Eastern store had plenty of rose water on hand. I ordered the edible roses from Heart of Texas Produce, a specialty food company in Austin. Tita's recipe also calls for pitaya, a delicious type of cactus fruit. But pitaya was out of season, so I substituted a dark red prickly pear fruit puree. You can also use frozen raspberries

6 quail
3 T butter
Salt and pepper to taste
1 c dry sherry
Petals of 6 fresh, organic red roses
6 peeled chestnuts (boiled, roasted or canned)
1 clove garlic
1/2 c pitaya or red prickly pear fruit puree (or substitute raspberries)
1 T honey
1/2 tsp ground anise seed

Rinse the quail and pat dry. In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, melt the butter and lightly brown the birds on all sides. Add sherry and salt and pepper the quail. Lower the heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes. Turn the quail, cover and cook another 10 minutes. Remove the quail, reserving the pan juices.

Rinse the rose petals in cold water. Place half the petals in the blender, with remaining ingredients and the pan juices. Puree until smooth. Transfer to a sauce pan and simmer 5 minutes. Adjust seasoning with more salt, pepper and/or honey. Pour sauce over quail and sprinkle with the remaining rose petals.

Keywords: Main Dish, Sauce, Easy, Mexican, Dinner, Game

( RG773 )

December 2, 2003